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How cash became king of the campaign

Nick O'malley Washington

A MONTH before the presidential election, America's political landscape is awash with cash. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been pumped into the election by corporations, unions and ideologically driven billionaires determined to reshape the world to suit themselves.

Cash has sluiced through the Obama and Romney campaign headquarters, pooled in the corporate offices of the ''independent'' Political Action Committees (super PACs) that support them and flowed in from so-called ''social welfare'' groups that pump ''dark money'' into the super PAC engine rooms.

What impact this roiling sea of cash will have on these elections and America's democracy is still being debated. It is not even clear why the tide of cash rose so quickly this year. All anyone can seem to agree on is that there is much, much more to come.

According to the mythology of this election, the floodgates were opened by the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision.

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Citizens United was a conservative group that had made a documentary attacking Hillary Clinton it wanted to air in the lead-up to the 2008 election, breaking rules that forbade corporations or unions from engaging in campaign spending 60 days before an election.

The Supreme Court knocked the regulations on the head.

Just months later the first PACs had formed and raised $65 million ($63.3 million).

Still the impact might not have been so great were it not for subsequent decisions in new cases in the following months that stripped away rules governing how much individuals could donate to the PACs and how and when the PACs could spend their money.

The PACs became super PACs. Even this might have been contained had the Federal Election Commission been able to draw up regulations on how closely the PACs could co-ordinate with campaigns and candidates. But like the rest of Washington the commission is hopelessly deadlocked between the Republican and Democrat commissioners that govern it.

Super PACs could not co-ordinate with campaigns or candidates, it ruled. But that does not mean much. Staff flitter back and forth between the PACs and the campaigns, candidates are allowed to travel with PACs and appear at their functions. PACs are formed to promote individuals or parties, or even issues, and to attack others.

Republican strategist Karl Rove set up a super PAC but then realised some donors might like to maintain anonymity. He set up an associated tax-exempt ''social welfare'' organisation that funnelled ''dark money'' into his super PAC.

So far, Rove's super PAC, American Crossroads, has spent $51 million supporting the Romney campaign, and his social welfare group, Crossroads GPS, has kicked in $30 million in dark money.

The president of Democracy 21, Fred Wertheimer, has been fighting for tighter controls on political money since the Watergate days. He told The Atlantic: ''This is a legalised-bribery kind of system where no one has to say anything. I don't have to say what I want - you know what I want.'' But Columbia Law School's Professor Nathaniel Persily is not so sure the Citizens United decision is entirely to blame. He thinks it has been possible for wealthy individuals or groups to get money to candidates for years, but Citizens United might have prompted a cultural shift.

''Corporate involvement in politics changed from being a licence into being a blessing,'' he observes, adding it is possible that wealthy people simply found themselves at odds with Barack Obama and sought to remove him as president.

After the laws passed Democrats and their supporters feared the Republicans would secure an immediate advantage. Obama even attacked the Supreme Court decision in a State of the Union address.

Since then the left has proved to be as adapt at extracting cash from donors as Republicans.

But Professor Anthony Corrado of Colby College notes that individuals can manipulate government even if competing sides raise similar amounts of money.

''Just the threat of a campaign [by an outside group] against a candidate can be enough to change the way they act,'' he says.

The Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig recently described in The Atlantic magazine how 196 people now account for more than 80 per cent of super PAC spending.

Jim Bopp jnr, the pro-life Republican lawyer from suburban Indiana who championed Citizens United's cause, boasted to The Atlantic : ''We are absolutely at tipping point. We are in the second election cycle with super PACs and now they are going to equal candidate spending. Two years from now they'll exceed candidate spending by 50 per cent … Two years after that it'll be three times candidate spending.''